178 A History of Judaism
evidently a popular mode of exegesis among Alexandrian Jews, since
Philo remarks not infrequently on customary interpretation of specific
texts, as in the interpretation of one of the passages in Genesis, in which
Abraham and Sarah went to Egypt and the king of Egypt was overcome
with plague because of his lust for Abraham’s wife Sarah:
I have also heard some natural philosophers who took the passage alle-
gorically, not without good reason. They said that the husband was a
figure for the good mind, judging by the meaning given for the interpret-
ation of this name that it stood for a good disposition of soul. The wife,
they said, was virtue, her name being in Chaldean Sarah but in our lan-
guage a sovereign lady, because nothing is more sovereign or dominant
than virtue.Elsewhere, Philo refers to contemporary allegorists with whom he dis-
agrees; we have seen above the vehemence of his opposition to extreme
allegorists who treated the literal interpretation of the laws ‘with easy-
going neglect’ because they thought only the symbolic meanings of
importance.^29
If any of these other allegorists in Philo’s day wrote down any of their
interpretations of the biblical texts, none now survives. The works of
Aristobulus are known only through the citation of fragments by Chris-
tian writers of the third and fourth centuries, principally Clement and
Eusebius. The preservation of so large a body of Philo’s allegorizing
biblical exegesis by these Christian authors, in contrast to the scraps of
Aristobulus, and the complete absence in their works of other allegoriz-
ing Jewish biblical commentaries suggest that Philo’s work was either
unique in its formation or (just as probable) unique in its preservation
in manuscript form over the century and a half between the death of the
author and the first definite Christian citation of his work.
In favour of Philo’s Judaism as somewhat exceptional in his day is
the reference to him by Josephus, who mentioned him just once in con-
nection with the embassy of the Alexandrian Jews to Caligula but
specifically noted that he was ‘not inexpert in philosophy’, an accolade
he accorded to no other contemporary Jew in his narrative. The descrip-
tion was earned perhaps less by Philo’s religious works than by his
philosophical treatises, such as the two dialogues On Providence and
On Animals, which cite Greek sources rather than the Bible, assume a
readership conversant with Hellenistic philosophy and are presented as
dialogues with a certain Alexander, who is almost certainly to be iden-
tified with Philo’s nephew, the apostate Tiberius Julius Alexander.